2. Codex Carolinus, described above for Codd. PQ, and for the Old Latin gue, contains in Gothic about forty verses of the Epistle to the Romans, first published by Knittel, 1762.
3. Codices Ambrosiani, or palimpsest fragments of five manuscripts, apparently like Cod. Carolinus, from Bobbio, and of about the same date, discovered by Mai in 1817 in the Ambrosian Library at Milan, and published by him and Count C. O. Castiglione (Ulphilæ Partium Ineditarum ... Specimen, in five parts, Milan, 1819, 1820, 1834, 1835, 1839). The last-named manuscripts are minutely described and illustrated by a rude facsimile in Horne's “Introduction,” and after him in Tregelles' “Horne,” vol. iv. [pg 147] pp. 304-7. They consist of (1) a portion of St. Paul's Epistles, under Homilies of Gregory the Great (viii); (2) portions of St. Paul, under Jerome on Isaiah (viii or ix); (3) parts of the Old Testament, under Plautus and part of Seneca; (4) under four pages of St. John in Latin part of St. Matt. xxvi, xxvii. The fifth fragment consists of Acts of the Council of Chalcedon with no extracts from the Bible. Mai refers some of the Gothic writing to the sixth century and some as far back as the fourth or beginning of the fifth. Unlike the Codex Argenteus (at least if we trust Dr. E. D. Clarke's facsimile of the latter), the words in Mai's palimpsests are continuous: they contain parts of Esther, Nehemiah (apparently no portion of the books of Kings), a few passages of the Gospels, and much of St. Paul[120]. H. F. Massmann (Ulfilas, Stuttgart, 1855-57) also added from an exposition a few verses of St. John, and there are fragments at Vienna and Rome[121].
These fragments (for such they still must be called)[122], in spite of the influence of the Latin, approach nearer to the received text, in respect of their readings, than the Egyptian or one or two other versions of about the same age; and from their similarity in language to the Teutonic have been much studied in Germany. The fullest and best edition of the whole collected, with a grammar and lexicon, is by H. C. von der Gabelentz and J. Loebe (Ulfilas Vet. et N. Testamenti versionis Gothicae fragmenta quae supersunt, Leipsic, 1836-46, viz. vol. i. Text, 1836; Pars ii. Glossarium, 1843; Pars ii. Grammatik, 1846), and of the Codex Argenteus singly that of And. Uppstrom (with a good facsimile), Upsal, 1854. This scholar published separately in 1857 ten leaves of the manuscript which had been stolen between 1821 and 1834, and were restored through him by the penitent thief on his death-bed. The Gothic Gospels, however, had been cited as early as 1675 in Fell's N. T., and more fully in Mill's, through Francis Junius' edition (with Marshall's critical notes), which was printed at Dort in 1665, from Derrer's accurate [pg 148] transcript of the Upsal manuscript, made in or about 1655, when it was in Isaac Vossius' possession. Other editions of the Codex Argenteus were published by G. Stiernhielm in 1671 for the College of Antiquaries at Stockholm; by E. Lye at the Clarendon Press in 1750 from the revision of Eric Benzel, Archbishop of Upsal; and (with the addition of the fragments in the Codex Carolinus) by Jo. Ihre in 1763, and by J. C. Zahn in 1805. And also the Gothic and Anglo-Saxon Gospels in parallel columns with the Versions of Wycliffe and Tyndale, London, 1865, and Ulfila, oder die Gotische Bibel (N. T.), E. Bernhardt, Halle, 1875, and St. Mark with a grammatical commentary, R. Müller and H. Hoeppe, 1881, and Skeat, Gospel of St. Mark in Gothic, Clarendon Press, 1882.
(2) The Armenian Version.
The existing Armenian version is a recension made shortly after the Council of Ephesus of a still earlier version, which was based in part upon a Syriac, in part upon a Greek original. This latest recension was made according to “accurate and reliable copies” of the Greek Bible, which, along with the Canons of the Council of Ephesus, were brought from Constantinople about the year 433. One would naturally wish for more details than the above brief statement contains; yet it is all that one can definitely infer from the history of the version as related by three nearly contemporary writers, whose accounts we now subjoin, namely, Koriun, Lazar of Pharpi, and Moses Khorenatzi.
Koriun[123] in his life of St. Mesrop (written between 441 and 452 a.d.) relates as follows:—
In the fifth year of the reign of Vramshapho [i.e. about 397 a.d.], St. Mesrop was first in Edessa, then in Amid, lastly in Samosata, busy all the time about his discovery of the Armenian characters[124]. In Samosata, where he was received with great respect by the clergy and bishop, Mesrop met with a Greek scribe, Hrofanos (? Rufinus), in conjunction with whom, and [pg 149] with the help of two pupils named John and Joseph, he undertook a translation of the Bible. They began—and this is noteworthy—with the book of the Proverbs of Solomon; Hrofanos or Rufinus writing down the translation with his own hand. Mesrop next visited the Bishop of the Syrians, who congratulated him on his work. He then returned to Nor Chalach, or new city, as Valarshapat was called by the Romans, in the sixth year of Vramshapho's reign, a.d. 398. At a later time, Koriun, the writer, was himself sent with Eznik to Constantinople, apparently in quest of books to translate; for they returned with a sure copy of the Scriptures, with works of the Fathers, and with the canons of the Councils of Nice and Ephesus. “Now St. Sahak had long before translated the collection of Church books from Greek into Armenian, as well as much true wisdom of the holy Patriarchs. But he now resumed, and taking with the help of Eznik the former translations made hurriedly and offhand, he confirmed them by the help of the true copies now brought, and they translated much commentary on the books.” The above is the gist of what Koriun has to tell us, though he mentions that scholars were sent to Edessa to translate and bring back the works of the Fathers. Why Mesrop began with the Book of Proverbs, whether he translated more than that, and from which language, we do not learn from Koriun. Lazar of Pharpi[125], who wrote in the last half of the sixth century, is our next authority. He states that up to the last decade of the fourth century, the offices of religion were still read in Greater Armenia in Syriac, a language which the people did not understand. The edicts of the kings of Armenia were also written out in Syriac or Greek characters. But as soon as the Armenian alphabet was discovered, St. Sahak—who was patriarch 390-428 a.d. and an expert in Greek—set himself, in response to the patriotic exhortations of St. Mesrop, of Vramshapho the king, and of the clergy and nobles, to translate the Holy Scriptures. He states that St. Sahak's version comprised the whole of the Old and New Testaments, and was made from Greek.
Moses of Chorene, bk. iii. ch. 36 ff., copies, confuses, and adds to Koriun's account. A little before 370 a.d. the Persians [pg 150] overran Armenia, and Meroujah, their leader, burned all the books he could find in the country, proscribed the study of the Greek language, and enacted penalties against any who should speak it or translate from it. At that time, adds Moses, the offices of the church were performed in Greek, because the Armenian alphabet did not yet exist. On the death of Theodosius (Jan. 395 a.d.) there was a partition of Armenia between his successor Arcadius and the king of Persia, by which the latter took undisputed possession of the eastern provinces, including the basin of Ararat, in which lay the new religious centre Valarshapat or Edschmiadzin, the νέα πόλις of the Romans. The new Mesropic alphabet was at first used only in Persian Armenia; for, says Moses, in the parts dependent on the Greeks, all writing had to be in Greek characters, Syriac being forbidden. As soon as Mesrop had elaborated his alphabet with the aid of Hrophanos, he betook himself to the work of translation; and with the aid of his pupils John and Joseph, translated the entire twenty-two authentic books along with the New Testament, taking care to begin with the Book of Proverbs. About the year 406 he returned to Armenia, and found St. Sahak engaged in translating the Syriac Bible. He hints that Sahak would have preferred a Greek original, if Meroujah had not burned all the Greek books nearly thirty years before. This perhaps implies that the version, on which Mesrop had been engaged in Samosata, was made from Greek. Nor is that unlikely; for Rufinus, who helped him, was a Greek, and we learn from Koriun that there were Armenians in Edessa studying both Greek and Syriac. We read in bk. iii. ch. 60 of the History of Moses, about missions sent to Edessa and Byzantium in order to the translation of the works of the Fathers, but we hear nothing more expressly touching the Version of the Bible, save this, that after the Council of Ephesus, Sahak and Mesrop, then in Ashtishat in Taron, received from Byzantium, as aforesaid, the canons of the council recently held, along with accurate copies of the Greek Bible. On receipt of these, Sahak and Mesrop translated afresh what had already been translated, and were zealous in recasting the text. But they were not, it seems, after all, satisfied with their work, and sent Moses to Alexandria to learn the “beautiful tongue” (i.e. Greek), with a view to a more accurate articulation and division (of the Armenian scriptures).
The above summary exhausts the evidence of Moses of Khorene[126]. It would appear therefrom that the Bible was translated twice into Armenian before the end of the fourth century; by Mesrop from Greek, and by Sahak from Syriac. The circumstance that Mesrop in Samosata began with the Proverbs of Solomon raises a suspicion that the earlier books had already been rendered, when and by whom is unknown. Certainly the reasons given by Koriun and by Moses for Mesrop beginning with Proverbs are insufficient. Moses again in stating that Sahak rendered the entire Bible from Syriac contradicts both Koriun and Lazar. Are we to infer that Sahak and Mesrop after 430 a.d. retranslated according to the Constantinople Bibles what they had already translated from Syriac, and also it would seem from a presumably less perfect Greek text? Anyhow it is unlikely that they would wholly sacrifice their own work, and we should therefore expect to find in the Armenian version a mixture of texts, namely of some old Syriac text, which must have been in vogue as late as 380, of some older Greek text supplied in Edessa or Samosata, and of the Constantinopolitan texts; which last may well have been among the fifty splendid copies which had been prepared under the order of Constantine by Eusebius a century before. If, and how far, these different elements enter into the Version can only be determined by a careful analysis of its readings. It may be that in some MSS. there lurks more of the unrevised text than in others[127]. The entire history is an apt illustration of that political see-saw between the Roman and the Persian powers which went on in Armenia during the fourth and fifth centuries, and out of which the patriotic vigour and devotion of St. Mesrop and St. Sahak carved at last a truly national Armenian Church, with an independent life and literature of its own.
The Armenian Version was collated for Robert Holmes' edition of the Septuagint, though not with desirable accuracy nor from the oldest MSS. For example, the Codex Arm. 3 of the Pentateuch, which Holmes declares, teste Adlero, to be of the year 1063, [pg 152] is but an eighteenth century codex. The collation of the New Testament in the eighth edition of Tischendorf's N. T. is accurate so far as it goes, but is far from being exhaustive or based on a consensus of the oldest MSS. Old codices of the Armenian Gospels are very common, and the present writer knows of as many as eight, none of them later than the year a.d. 1000; of four of these he has complete collations. The rest of the N. T. is only found in codices of the whole Bible, which are rare and always written in minuscules, never in uncials as are the Gospels. He knows of no copies of the whole Bible older than the twelfth century.